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WORDING THE SILENCE: INITIATORY READING OF MYSTICAL TEXTS
and heaven is what gives structure to the statement: the language of heaven
(hemelsche redene) cannot be understood by means of earthly things (ertrike).
But for what she has experienced, she does not know ‘any Dutch or any
language’, although she does know all ‘sensible speech of which a person can
know’ (alle redene van sinne alsoe mensche connen mach, 114-120)
For all I have said to you
is like no Dutch in regard to this,
for no Dutch belongs to this, so far as I know. (Letter 17, 114-122)
Want al dat ic v gheseghet hebbe / dat en es alse gheen dietsch daer toe / want daer
en hoert gheen toe dat ic weet.
At the end of the letter she demands the works of love of her friend and
disciple. She does so by means of a construction that in its form unites
‘working’ and ‘resting’. At the centre of the same syntactic form repeated four
times, are four verbs that in each case express activity but in the impersonal
infinitive: ‘to take upon’, ‘to work’, ‘to protect’ and ‘to further’. This active core
is surrounded by the harmonising ‘nothing else... than Love’, in which the
stress falls naturally on Minne:
Nothing else to take upon one than Love,
nothing else to work than Love,
nothing else to protect than Love,
nothing else to further than Love. (Letter 17, 131-134)
El niet te onderwindene dan Minne / El niet te werkene dan Minne, / El niet
te bescermene dan Minne, El niet in staden te stane dan Minne.
But then, her role as magistra ends:
How you are to do and to leave undone each of these things,
may God, our Beloved, point out that to you
hoe ghi elc doen selt ende laten, / dat moet v god wisen, onse lief.
God himself must show her how to find her own balance.
Hadewijch uses a similar rhetorical device in her shortest letter, which
I am going to quote from beginning to end below. Whereas in Letter 17
her conclusion is that the addressee must obtain knowledge from God by
experiencing Him in unity, here she introduces the letter with the following
topos. She starts with the remark that God himself must teach the ‘beloved
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